Protecting young mothers critical to meet UN goal of eliminating new HIV infections among children by 2015. The international AIDS conference began Sunday in Australia.

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, left, speaks alongside co-chair Sharon Lewin during the opening ceremony of the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, on Sunday.

By:Jason GaleBloomberg, Published on Sun Jul 20 2014

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—In a busy Mozambique clinic, a 25-year-old mother says she won’t tell her estranged husband she has HIV for fear she will be blamed and beaten.

“Very often here women won’t tell their partners or ex-partners that they’re HIV-infected,” said Sifronia Filipe, an educator at the clinic where the mom is being treated for AIDS. “She is scared he will leave her or will tell the neighbourhood and the neighbours will discriminate against her.”

It’s a scene oft repeated across sub-Saharan Africa, where young women account for a quarter of new HIV infections and where AIDS remains a devastating scourge. The problem is especially acute in southern nations like Mozambique, where 7 per cent of all teenage girls are HIV-positive. That number doubles to 15 per cent by age 25, according to a report by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS released last week.

Protecting young mothers will be critical if the world is to meet a UN target of eliminating new HIV infections among children by 2015. At the international AIDS conference that started Sunday in Melbourne, Australia, public figures from Burma’s political activist Aung San Suu Kyi to Virgin Group founder Richard Branson will lead a call to fight stigma and discrimination, which has blighted progress in poorer nations.

“Some people, if they find out they’re HIV-positive, they will change hospitals or scratch out their test result on their medical records,” said Aleny Couto, head of the HIV program with the Mozambique government’s Ministry of Health. “We still have stigma in this country, which is still a very big obstacle.”

It’s been three decades since AIDS began ravaging populations around the globe. While new infections have fallen to the lowest level this century and AIDS-related deaths are at a seven-year low, a “youth bulge” experienced by many countries with the highest HIV prevalence means that the number of young people living with HIV or at risk of becoming infected will increase in the next five years, the New York-based Population Council said last week.

A so-called Melbourne Declaration prepared for this week’s meeting affirms that stigma and discrimination “have no place in any effective response to HIV,” said Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, the conference’s co-chair, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV.

As long as HIV stigma exists, people are likely to hide or ignore their status, creating a barrier to treatment that puts their health and the health of their partners and children at risk.

In Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony that was in the grip of civil war from 1977 to 1992, the number of people living with HIV has swelled to 1.6 million, with an average of 317 new infections occurring daily. Teenage girls, among whom 21 per cent are sexually active, are especially vulnerable, according to the UNAIDS report.

An “unacceptably high” prevalence of HIV women from age 15 to 24 is seen in almost every country in eastern and southern Africa, UNAIDS said in the document, calling the data “stark and worrisome.”

Migrant labourers working in South African mines and their partners are among those at greatest risk of HIV. A job in the mines means living away for months in an area with an active sex industry, a 2012 study by the World Bank of mines, migration and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa found.

A survey of more than 700 Mozambican miners working in neighbouring South Africa found 75 per cent who tested positive for HIV didn’t know their status. In the absence of routine sexual health screening, infections are often noted first in pregnant women attending antenatal clinics.